AMD Refocuses on Desktop and Datacenter

AMD announced a significant change in direction, moving away from low-end PCs and refocusing on commercial and high-end PCs and the datacenter.

AMD this week introduced not only a new roadmap of products for the rest of this year, but a significant change in direction, moving away from low-end PCs and refocusing on commercial and high-end PCs and the datacenter. Driving this are some new technologies, including high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for new graphics boards and "Zen," the company's first new ground-up x86 core in several years.

Lisa Su, CEO and president, said AMD's goal this year was to "sharpen the focus" with an emphasis on profitability. Over the past three years, the company has diversified into embedded and semi-custom products including the processors at the heart of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

While that remains a big focus of the company, Su said that going forward the company wants to focus on gaming, immersive platforms, and the datacenter, and has decided not to invest in Internet of Things endpoints, low-end tablets, or smartphones. (By "immersive platforms" she means mostly PCs, though also parts of the embedded market, such as gaming machines.) In addition, the company announced recently that it would exit the SeaMicro microserver business. As a result, the company is stressing a simplified roadmap, removing things such as Project Skybridge, a plan to allow socket-compatible x86 and ARM-based cores.

To me, the biggest change is the renewed focus on the datacenter, where even Su acknowledged, "we have not been competitive." In addition, the focus on the PC platforms seems to be moving from more low-end systems to those focused on commercial and high-end consumers. Acknowledging that the company has lost market share in recent years, the goal is to "gain that share back in more profitable segments." That makes sense, but it is in many ways a reversal of the company's previous strategy.

Zen Core Aims at High-End PCs, Servers In many ways, the biggest change to AMD's products going forward is a new x86 core, enabling a new emphasis on high-end desktop chips and the server market.

CTO Mark Papermaster said the company has spent the past 2.5 years working on a new microarchitecture known as "Zen." Created by a team headed by designer Jim Keller (who was known as the designer of AMD's K8 architecture more than a decade ago), the new Zen core includes many new elements compared to the company's existing cores. Chief among these is that it can handle 40 percent more instructions per clock, which should make it more competitive with Intel's high-end cores. Other new features include simultaneous multithreading (SMT) support and a new high-bandwidth, low latency cache system. It will be manufactured initially on a 14nm FinFET process, and will be aimed at the high-end consumer and enterprise markets.

"Zen puts competition back to high-performance x86," Su said. The first product based on the Zen Core will be in its desktop FX CPU line in 2016.

I'm looking forward to seeing how well the Zen-based products perform next year. Intel hasn't really faced competition in the high-end desktop PC processor market for several years, as AMD's products haven't kept pace. (AMD's A-series had better integrated graphics, but high-end PCs aimed at gaming or workstations all use discrete graphics.)

The Zen core will also be used in an upcoming server processor, though apparently not until later. In a presentation on the datacenter market, Forrest Norrod, general manager of the company's enterprise, embedded, and semi-custom business, listed a Zen-based server on the roadmap for 2016-2017.

High Bandwidth Memory The other piece of technology that intrigues me is a new memory architecture called High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which AMD said it will introduce as part of a new graphics announcement in a few weeks, obviously a reference to the next iteration of the company's Radeon graphics products. AMD has been pretty consistent in its roadmap for graphics, where it and Nvidia remain head-to-head competitors.

Papermaster described this as using 3D DRAM stacked on die placed on a silicon interposer with the GPU, offering a direct connection between the GPU and the memory. (People in the semiconductor industry often call this 2.5D packaging since the memory stack sits beside the processor on a silicon interposer and not directly on top.) Papermaster said this would allow three times the performance per watt, compared with GDDR5 memory.

Su said this high bandwidth memory would be a part of new high-end Radeon graphics boards for desktops, which will also include support for Microsoft's Direct X12 (which she said was inspired by AMD's early work for a thinner software layer with the Mantle API) and Liquid VR. Liquid VR is AMD's answer for virtual reality content, introduced at the Game Developers Conference in March. Su said that VR is " the toughest problem to solve in graphics" because you must keep up with 3D images with very low latency.

High bandwidth memory techniques may also make their way into other kinds of products beyond graphics, though that will take longer.

Roadmap; Carrizzo and Graphics for Laptops and Desktops

These new features are part of a new, simpler roadmap from AMD that includes client, server, and datacenter products.

Later this quarter, Su said AMD will be formally introducing its sixth-generation mobile A-series APU (a term the company uses for processors with CPU and graphics components), known as Carrizzo. This will still be manufactured on the same 28nm process as the earlier products.

It's based on a core called "Excavator," which is an update of the existing Piledriver core. Papermaster said this core offers only "incremental changes" from the existing core, but said it adds 40 percent more performance and better energy efficiency than the current APUs.

Su said Carrizzo will offer 40 percent faster graphics than Intel's Core i5 and up to twice the battery life. (Again, I'll withhold judgement until we can see final products). While AMD previously announced this was shipping, Su said systems would be ready for the "back–to-school" season.

A version of Carrizzo will also be available in the "AMD Pro" line, aimed at commercial customers, in the second half of this year.

For 2016, this will be followed by an FX-series CPU based on the Zen core, using a new socket that it will share with a follow-up to the A-series APUs, which is on the roadmap for next year. For that 2016 APU, Su said the focus will remain on performance per watt. She wouldn't discuss whether this will have a future version of the Excavator core or the new Zen cores, or whether it (like the Zen-based products) would switch to a newer manufacturing process.

In addition to the new Radeon desktop graphics boards coming in a few weeks, AMD this week announced a new Radeon M300 series, with DirectX 12 support, aimed at the notebook market.

In 2016, the GPUs will move to the 14nm FinFET process, with Su promising a substantial improvement in performance per watt, and the second generation of the HBM memory architecture.

Re-Engaging the Datacenter Market The other area I was glad to see AMD taking a stronger interest in is the datacenter, which Norrod said was the main reason he joined AMD six months ago. AMD plans to "get back into the enterprise infrastructure" at a time when enterprise infrastructure is undergoing changes, driven by software-defined infrastructure and new capabilities such as using GPUs for more general calculations (known as GPGPU).

Norrod said the "need to drive competition, innovation, and the economics of the market has never been more dire," and said AMD offers a choice of technologies for the market.

That said, AMD does not seem to have a viable mainstream server product for 2015, though it does have some technology for specific markets.

The company plans to ship its ARM-based server processor, known as the Opteron A1100 "Seattle" processor, in the second half of this year. Powered by ARM Cortex-A57 cores, it will be the first true enterprise-class ARM server. AMD has been working closely with ecosystem partners to get software, compilers, and drivers ready to go, Norrod said.

In addition, the company will be pushing its FirePro S9150 graphics cards for server-based GPU computation, particularly in the high-performance computing market. Norrod noted that a system based on AMD graphics is now on top of the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers.

For future years, the roadmap seems more interesting. The highlight is a next-generation Opteron server processor based on the new Zen core, with Norrod saying AMD has made a "multi-generation commitment" to the CPU. Though details on this new chip weren't released, Norrod promised a high core count and native I/O capability, as well as "disruptive memory bandwidth," which sounds like a future version of the high-bandwidth memory that is debuting on the graphics cards this quarter.

The Seattle ARM server will be followed by one based on a custom ARM core known as "K12," which Papermaster said was "on track for 2017 sampling." This is aimed not only at servers, but at storage, networking, and embedded apps, with a focus on replacing PowerPC and MIPS-based processors within such devices.

In addition, he promised a high-performance server APU, one that combines CPU and GPU performance, for specific applications, such as machine learning and graphics simulation. Norrod said AMD's goal is to drive GPU and APU technology for HPC and machine learning into the mainstream.

Overall, he said, "it's never been more important to have different types of systems" because of the different kind of applications now being run. That makes sense to me, as does AMD's attempt to compete in the server market, where Intel is so dominant.

In most of these cases – mostly client and server products – the new technologies are certainly intriguing, though I wish they were going to make it to market sooner. But it's always good to see different ideas and more competition

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
More »